Follow the Fader

What We’re Reading: Deidre Dyer

Tired of reading the same recommended books from the usual sources? Just think of our weekly What We’re Reading column as your non-committal book club with The FADER and some of your favorite bands. For this installment, Style Assistant Deidre Dyer writes about some recent highlights..

"This Is How You Lose Her" by Junot Diaz: Diaz has a blunt and sometimes exaggerated way of conveying the emotional turmoil of heterosexual men. Many of these emotions I can barely fathom, but Diaz makes them predictable: self-serving, over-grown man-boys that pillage the hearts of women with no thought of tomorrow and disregard for the consequences. I am happy that Diaz wrote this book and not a female author—critics would chalk it up to male-bashing and write it off as an assault on the opposite sex. Thankfully, Diaz is willing to take his own kind to task, simultaneously sympathizing and excorciating, in this collection of interwoven short stories about love affairs gone awry.

"I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being A Woman" by Nora Ephron: This week our editor-in-chief Matthew Schnipper playfully chided me for having the same musical tastes as his father: namely Carly Simon, James Taylor and Carol King. This next book is in a similar vein. I'm not old and I'm not white, but I like Nora Ephron's personal essays. Ephron mines jokes out of everyday lady problems, like aging gracefully, the joys of baking and exactly what how much time and money it takes to look good nowadays. She talks about personal lows in upbeat ways: her failing eye sight, her multiple divorces, a botched neck surgery. In the last essay in this book, "Considering The Alternative," she faces her Woody Allen-esque preoccupation with mortality and the death of her best friend. Ephron never sugarcoats the unattractive bits of life. Maybe reading this book was like the time I started wearing anti-aging regenrative eye cream when I turned twenty-two, just to be prepared for what lies ahead. Thanks for heads up Nora and rest in peace.